Mithradates VI Eupator Quotes
No laws, human or divine, prevent the Romans from seizing and destroying enemies or friends, those near them and those far off, weak or powerful, and from considering every government that does not serve them, especially monarchies, as their enemies.
Mithradates the Great, 134 BC-63 BC, Mithradates VI, King of Pontus and Armenia Minor (now Turkey), Warning to all about Rome, the superpower of the day, Quoted in Stacy Schiff, Cleopatra, 2010
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
There had been an era whereby the French military had conquered much of Africa without the approval of the civilian authorities.
The Barbary Pirates had an incredible extortion racket going in the Mediterranean. If nations would pay them an annual sum each year, they would not attack and seize merchant ships of that country and sell the ships and goods while holding the sailors for ransom. President Jefferson had first dispatched American warships and authorized a major land operation which were very effective. Finally, a treaty was negotiated but Decatur reminded the Navy of what brought the Algerians to the negotiating table.
This was not the ravings of a right wing extremist. It was normative for Prussia as a whole. Right wing extremism as we think of it today was the norm of the ruling classes in Prussia and other parts of Germany. This book was a best seller in Germany. This quotation illustrates the mentality of the conservative, militarist, culture that dominated Germany at the time. The German aggression of WWI was not even considered as immoral but a God-given right.
When the British first colonized South Africa, the area they used was not inhabited or very sparcely so. However, some Black tribes (including the Zulus) were moving from the north and themselves were colonizing or annexing the sparcely populated areas to their kingdom. The British were most interested in Trading so did not have large land asperations. The Dutch white Boer Africanners, in contrast, wanted to farm the lands and use the range for their cattle. They wanted the land. The English policy was that there would be friendly relations with the Black tribes surrounding their Cape Colony and no one should take their land. However the Boers started attacking the Black areas and seizing their farms and villages. At first, the English assumed that the Blacks would easily be able to ward off the invasion as the Afrikanners had no professional troops like the British. However, the neighboring native tribes were not very warlike or good fighters. They were being overrun by the Zulus coming from the North and the Boers from the South. The British Government had a real problem in that they would have to have British soldiers fight the white Afrikanners if they wanted to stop the illegal white invasions. This was the root of the Boer War where the British would be fully at war with the Africanners.
Mithridates or Mithradates VI Eupator (Greek: Μιθριδάτης; 135–63 BC) was the ruler of the Kingdom of Pontus in northern Anatolia from 120 to 63 BC, and one of the Roman Republic's most formidable and determined opponents. He was an effective, ambitious and ruthless ruler who sought to dominate Asia Minor and the Black Sea region, waging several hard-fought but ultimately unsuccessful wars (the Mithridatic Wars) to break Roman dominion over Asia and the Hellenic world. He has been called the greatest ruler of the Kingdom of Pontus. He cultivated an immunity to poisons by regularly ingesting sub-lethal doses; this practice, now called mithridatism, is named after him. After his death, he became known as Mithridates the Great.
